Don’t Stop Believing

On Wednesday night, Symphony Space hosted “An Evening with The Believer” as part of their annual “Selected Shorts” series, which pays tribute to the short story. The Believer is an arts-and-culture magazine that doesn’t publish fiction. It does, however, publish nonfiction by fiction writers, and rumor has it that the editors have been known to write a bit of fiction themselves.

The actor Stephen Lang read “The Honored Dead,” by Breece D’J Pancake, with an unhurried rhythm that captured the grief of a narrator whose best friend died in Vietnam while he waited out the war at college. The playwright Will Eno recited his monologue “Interview,” with flickering gestures and a wide-eyed, cheeky stare, throwing out revelations such as “I was sort of soundproof as a child,” “I’ve always been interested in magnetic refrigerator poetry,” and “Everything gets so dim in life.”

And then there was Alec Baldwin. He read “Covered,” by Julia Slavin, a story about a middle-aged man who is ruthlessly pursued by his childhood security blanket. When a sexy childhood crush calls out to the narrator by name (“Stevvveee!”), Baldwin stretched out the name, slow as honey. He pushed his shoulders back, his chest forward, and his hips to the side, and seemed for a moment to be transformed into a woman who has spent a lifetime exploiting her exploding bosom and behind.